Palisades Park by Alan Brennert

Palisades Park by Alan Brennert

Bestseller Alan Brennert's spellbinding story about a family of dreamers and their lives within the legendary Palisades Amusement Park

Growing up in the 1930s, there is no more magical place than Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey--especially for seven-year-old Antoinette, who horrifies her mother by insisting on the unladylike nickname Toni, and her brother, Jack. Toni helps her parents, Eddie and Adele Stopka, at the stand where they sell homemade French fries amid the roar of the Cyclone roller coaster. There is also the lure of the world's biggest salt-water pool, complete with divers whose astonishing stunts inspire Toni, despite her mother's insistence that girls can't be high divers.
But a family of dreamers doesn't always share the same dreams, and then the world intrudes: There's the Great Depression, and Pearl Harbor, which hits home in ways that will split the family apart; and perils like fire and race riots in the park. Both Eddie and Jack face the dangers of war, while Adele has ambitions of her own--and Toni is determined to take on a very different kind of danger in impossible feats as a high diver. Yet they are all drawn back to each other--and to Palisades Park--until the park closes forever in 1971.
Evocative and moving, with the trademark brilliance at transforming historical events into irresistible fiction that made Alan Brennert's Moloka'i and Honolulu into reading group favorites, Palisades Park takes us back to a time when life seemed simpler--except, of course, it wasn't.

ALAN BRENNERT is the author of Moloka'i, which was a 2006-2007 BookSense Reading Group Choice and won the 2006 Bookies Award for Novel Club Book of the Year (beating out Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper, Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, and James Frey's A Million Little Pieces). It was on the bestselling lists of BookSense, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Honolulu Advertiser, and (for 16 weeks) the NCIBA. Alan has also received an Emmy Award for his efforts as a writer and producer on the television show L.A. Confidential. For his novella MaQui, he won a Nebula Award. He resides in the city of Sherman Oaks, California.